Am no fan of the Chinese, especially the leadership but come on.

Every few years thereâ(TM)s a new breathless article on real estate, banking, statistical shenanigans.

If it smells like propaganda it probably is propaganda.

I am not a heavy Excel user, but occasionally I need to write a slightly complicated formula. Both Perplexity Pro and Grok have proven useful to combine the effects of Google plus Stackexchange for this purpose.

Then I tried generating some python code for Klayout. The template generated might have saved me an hour or two. Which is not bad.

But I would not try to build a startup around it.

Big surprise.

I work with a bunch of PhDs - trust me, they can be quite clueless.

One genius insists on no passwords on his account because he cannot keep track of them. Another insists that every machine he uses should have the same hostname.

The absent minded professor stereotype is true.

A dozen or so 5 1/4 inch floppies, and an office PC built to spec - I vaguely remember having to find SCSI drives for some reason. Or was it a very specific network card?

Became the email gateway for the company.

With all the confusing blocking options, itâ(TM)s a major waste of time trying to figure out what some threads are about.

I got banned for mocking this aspect (gently) and canâ(TM)t be bothered to appeal it.

I have Perplexity Pro free for a year thanks to Airtel, and Grok thanks to X.

Competition is good.

That alone was enough for me to uninstall it. If I have to find a contact, which is rare these days, almost everyone retired or got laid off, I can always log in on a browser.

Never gonna happen - at least from India.

Our politicians are too spineless to sanction anyone especially when it comes to anything which might affect employment locally.

China on the other hand could do it.

Lots of free publicity for the startup.

A connection with the anti-trust case against Google can not be ruled out. Gives google a way to say âoewe are not a monopoly, see Chrome can be spun off if required.â

IANAL of course.

So who are we blaming today?

Seriously. What is he doing?

With nukes. You forgot the nukes.

I used to start every interview with the same question: âoeTell me about the last book you read.â

The best candidates used to read, and could discuss it. Whatever it was. Something. Anything. After ten minutes you could steer the interview back to the actual job at hand and get real answers.

Have not been able to use this technique for the last ten years. These days they freeze up.

Instead of selling one expensive part, they will sell more of their cheaper parts at a higher overall price.

Higher volume, higher revenue, so what if Trump is skimming off 15%?

The companies would have worked the math, it must be worthwhile.